Hike messenger, India’s homegrown chat application, has introduced free ‘Hike Calls’. The introduction of this feature will allow hike users to call each other for free, over 2G, 3G and Wi-Fi and across the globe in over 200 countries. The introduction of hike calls has come in within a month of hike making it’s first acquisition – a free calling app – Zip Phone, as stated by the company in its press release.
The free hike calling feature has been launched in beta on Android platform, which contributes to over 90% of hike’s user base. The iOS and Windows versions are slated to release by the end of this quarter.
Hike calls are claimed to be optimized to consume very little data, giving its users more calling minutes per MB of data. Given that a majority of the mobile-internet users of India are still experimenting with data and are not on a high-bandwidth connection, this optimization becomes critical for the Indian market.
Launched in December 2012, hike is claimed to have over 35M users as in August, 2014. The app also boasts of a fairly young user base with over 90% of its users being under the age of 25 and residing in India. The chat application has localized features, which are developed keeping in mind the infrastructural and cultural requirements such as Hike Offline – lets you message your friends even when they’re offline, Hidden Mode – allows users to hide their private chats with a password, Regional Stickers – helps users express more in their own language, amongst many others.
